Oh No...this is my life?!

I had some interesting questions from Chucky and Junosmom that made me giggle, so I thought maybe I should explain "my life"! After all, we're not all hicks here on the worldwideweb!

Today, someone at the feedlot (a large area with many pens with cattle in various phases of 'fattening' out...kind of a legal version of Aushwitz...sorry, but there you have it...I can't believe I'm not a vegetarian yet....) Anyhoo, he asked me how my "life" (that would be my day to day activities) was going...and I said, "Oh just peachy! I get to drive around our beautiful countryside and deposit large amounts of poopie for my friends and neighbors!" Yeah, this is my winter life!



Chucky asked what the manure was doing when it was NOT being hauled...fair question! So, here you have it...the whole process.



First off all, our primary business is Silage Chopping and Hauling. Silage is anything from corn, to sorghum, to triticale or even hay. It's not, as I first thought, an actual crop (I thought there was a plant called 'ensilage' or 'silage'!) It's actually a process. Our chopper takes 8 rows of corn at a time and chops into pieces less than a quarter inch long, the whole plant, not just the ears, and it does it at about 4.5 miles an hour. That may not seem fast, but in the field? Yeah, that's fast. You've seen pictures of my truck and trailer (or if you haven't it's a semi with a 34' foot trailer)...so to give you perspective, it fills my trailer, as I'm driving along beside it, in less than 7 minutes.








Not my truck, but you get the idea~!



We then haul it to the feedyard where it's dumped into "pits" and big tractor's drive over it and over it to "pack" it. It is then used in a feed "mixture" with other stuff. I don't know exactly what that is, but that's their business, not mine.




Now, after the cows have eaten this delicious concotion...they then proceed to eliminate it, leaving large "pies". The feedlot personnel then drive around the pen with a scraper until they have it all neat and tidy into a large hill whereupon the cattle like to play.


Then the EPA gets their panties in a wad and wants the manure hauled off. So in the past, the feedlot had to pay for that service. Now? Compost, the green thing of "the future", has taken off and become popular (and cheaper) so the feedlot is then able, to sell their shit. (No shit, their shit is now worth something!)


This is where our winter work comes in. Stay with me here. We chop the corn from a farmer, we haul it in, the cow eats and eliminates, we come back, pick it up again and haul it to the same farmers field (well, it could be a neighbor...) and dump it for fertilizer to grow more corn or whatever. So we can do it again.
(I have to admit this is a picture after one of our employee's put his trailer up directly into a power line! See how it broke and is curled up on the pile of shit? See how close he was to the darn pole, which should have been a CLUE! It blew out four tires, the rest eventually burnt up. He got OUT of the truck! We are so lucky we didn't send him back to S. Africa in an ashtray, the electric guys said if the current would have been flowing "the other way", he'd so be dead....I thank God every day that turned out to be a monetary problem rather than a human one!) But there you have it, somewhere in that pile of poo is corn we chopped. I'm sure of it.

So for all of you people who would like to make fun of me for being a "shit hauler"....know this. I am not a shit hauler...I am a silage recycler! Haul it in as feed and haul it out as fertilizer!

I am SUCH a public servant (omg...is this my life?!)